Obama's Socialist Plan

Obama's Global Tax
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, July 29, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: A plan by Barack Obama to redistribute American wealth on a global level is moving forward in the Senate. It follows Marxist theology — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

We are citizens of the world, Sen. Obama told thousands of nonvoting Germans during his recent tour of the Middle East and Europe. And if the Global Poverty Act (S. 2433) he has sponsored becomes law, which is almost certain if he wins in November, we're also going to be taxpayers of the world.

Speaking in Berlin, Obama said: "While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history."

What the 20th century really showed was a series of totalitarian threats — from fascism to Nazism to communism — defeated by the U.S. military. Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Tojo's Japan and the Soviet Union offered destinies we did not share.

Our destiny of peace and freedom through strength was not achieved by a transnationalist fantasy of buying the world a Coke and singing "Kumbaya."

Obama's Global Poverty Act offers us a global socialist destiny we do not want, one that challenges America's very sovereignty. The former "post-racial" candidate obviously intends to be a post-national president.

A statement from Obama's office says: "With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces. It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter and clean drinking water."

These are worthy goals, but note there's no mention of spreading democracy, expanding free trade, promoting entrepreneurial capitalism or ridding the world of despots who rule and ravage countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan.

Obama would give them all a fish without teaching them how to fish. Pledging to cut global poverty in half on the backs of U.S. taxpayers is a ridiculous and impossible goal.

His legislation refers to the "millennium development goal," a phrase from a declaration adopted by the United Nations Millennium Assembly in 2000 and supported by President Clinton.

It calls for the "eradication of poverty" in part through the "redistribution (of) wealth of land" and "a fair distribution of the earth's resources." In other words: American resources.

It's a mantra of liberals that the U.S. is only a small portion of the world's population yet consumes an unseemly portion of the planet's supposedly finite resources. Never mentioned is the fact that America's population, just 5% of the world's total, also produces a stunning 27% of the world's GDP — to the enormous benefit of other countries. Nonetheless, their solution is to siphon off the product of our free democracy and distribute it.

We already transfer too much national wealth to the United Nations and its busybody agencies. Obama's bill would force U.S. taxpayers to fork over 0.7% of our gross domestic product every year to fund a global war on poverty, spending well above the $16.3 billion in global poverty aid the U.S. already spends.

Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development Conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S is expected to meet its part of the U.N. Millennium goals, we would be spending an additional $65 billion annually for a total of $845 billion.

During a time of economic uncertainty, the plan would cost every American taxpayer around $2,500.

If you're worried abut gasoline and heating oil prices now, think what they'll be like when the U.S. is subjected in an Obama administration to global energy consumption and production taxes. Obama's Global Poverty Act is the "international community's" foot in the door.

The U.N. Millennium declaration called for a "currency transfer tax," a "tax on the rental value of land and natural resources," a "royalty on worldwide fossil energy production — oil, natural gas, coal . . . fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for the airplane use of the skies, fees for the use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on the carbon content of fuels."

Co-sponsors of S. 2433 include Democrats Maria Cantwell of Washington, Dianne Feinstein of California, Richard Durbin of Illinois and Robert Menendez of New Jersey. GOP globalists supporting the bill include Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Richard Lugar of Indiana.

Lugar has worked with Obama to promote more aid to Russia to promote nuclear nonproliferation. Lugar also promotes the Law of the Sea treaty, which turns over the world's oceans to an International Seabed Authority that would charge us to drill offshore and have veto power over the movements and actions of the U.S. Navy.

Obama's agenda sounds like defeated 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry's "global test" for U.S. foreign policy decisions where "you have to do it in a way that passes the test — that passes the global test — where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

Obama has called on the U.S. to "lead by example" on global warming and probably would submit to a Kyoto-like agreement that would sock Americans with literally trillions of dollars in costs over the next half century for little or no benefit.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama has said. "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."

Oh, really? Who's to say we can't load up our SUV and head out in search of bacon double cheeseburgers at the mall? China? India? Bangladesh? The U.N.?

In an Obama White House, American sovereignty will become an endangered species. The Global Poverty Act is the first toe in the water of global socialism.